A Journalist’s Homecoming

Sometimes you have to leave a place–or a job–to discover that’s where you are meant to be. At least that’s what journalist Kat Greene, a member of Washington and Lee’s Class of 2008, recently discovered.

Kat always wanted to be a reporter. As she wrote last fall on her Facebook page, which the Talking Biz News website quoted, “When I was very young and playing house, I would go off to ‘work,’ where I typed away at a broken old typewriter. Writing stories came through me, as though I didn’t do it intentionally. I felt called to it.” It’s no surprise that at W&L, she majored in journalism and mass communications.

After graduation, she landed posts at Dow Jones Newswires, Institutional Investor and the (Phoenix) Arizona Republic. Writing about business news for the Phoenix paper, however, she found herself dissatisfied. What had once been a dream field where she could gain the experience to be a managing editor now seemed to have changed—and not for the better—along with the entire news business. And so she left.

“Now I was doing the one thing no one would have predicted,” she wrote, “and I felt liberated.”

Kat returned home, to the Atlanta area. And now she has a new job that seems familiar—as the banking and finance reporter for the Atlanta Business Chronicle. “I decided that I wasn’t looking for a job or a career path—I was looking for a home,” she told Talking Biz News. “I hope that’s what I’ve found here, back in my literal hometown, but also at this close-knit company.”